The Riot Act

Share via

THE story of Sophocles’ Antigone, and its heroine’s refusal to capitulate to the tyranny of the State, was reinterpreted by Jean Anouilh to represent the resistance of the French to Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Athol Fugard reset the tragedy in South Africa under apartheid in The Island. In his punchy, 55-minute drama The Riot Act, written in 1984, Tom Paulin applies the same tale of individual courage and political hypocrisy to Northern Ireland.

Despite the protests of her sister, Ismene, Antigone insists on burying the body of her dead brother, Polynices, who has been condemned as an